an itinerant observer

I watched The Life of Chuck on a flight out of JFK. The plane had just lifted, and the movie found me. No distractions, no wandering thoughts. It landed inside me faster than Flow had on another journey . I came of age reading Stephen King. From the haunting darkness of Salem’s Lot , The Shining , Cujo , and It to the unexpected humanity of his short stories adapted into The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me , King shaped my sense of how worlds can collapse, and how small, luminous acts still matter. The Life of Chuck felt like the natural continuation of that arc: not horror, but mortality seen through wonder. The story runs backward. Death first. Then middle age. Then childhood.  The world itself collapses into darkness, only to reveal the celebration of one man’s life, Chuck’s. Thirty-nine years written as if they were the span of a cosmos.  When he dies, the lights go out. That is the point: each of us carries a universe inside, and when it ends, so does the world ...

“Enaya has told another child in class that the world will end on December 21, 2012. This is unacceptable behavior…”,  were the 1 st lines of the email from the class teacher. Enaya aka Noori, the 6-year-old 1 st grader had happened to mention the Mayan prophecy to her young class fellow. She had done so without realizing the repercussions of mentioning doomsday scenarios in a public school setting. Maybe saying such things in a private school might not have generated a hyper-anxious email from the class teacher. Ayesha and I promptly responded to the email. I think Ayesha did so a bit apologetically. I, on the other hand, gave a complete account of the Mayan prophecy that I had taken quite a fascination to. I explained to the teacher that per that prediction made many hundreds of years ago, the world was going to end in a few weeks. I went on to inform the teacher that what Noori had mentioned was well known to most, if not all in Houston. The publicity of the world en...